


Touch My Heart

by threewalls



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Community: kink_bingo, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/F, Frottage, Guro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-08
Updated: 2013-03-08
Packaged: 2017-12-04 13:04:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/711067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threewalls/pseuds/threewalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aurora likes to feel her heart in Mulan's hands. (Spoilers up to and including for "Queen of Hearts")</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touch My Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, Lynndyre for betaing, and to Mec, nounou, and BP, for conversations that have contributed to this story. <3
> 
> Written for Kink Bingo: "guro" (wild card), and H/C Bingo: "cuddling for warmth." Because I'm all about the cute, romantic guro.

"Two rabbits," Mulan calls, to announce her return. 

"I can see that," Aurora says, taking them from her. A princess she is, yes, but one whose first sixteen years were that of a woodcutter's daughter, raised by fairies concealed as spinster aunts. 

"You catch them; I cook them," Aurora says, a little later, with rabbit's blood washed from her hands. "We make a pretty good team."

The woods are a little darker, but not dark enough yet to conceal the way her cheeks colour when Mulan cautiously matches her smile, nor that she immediately begins to talk of other things. Mulan keeps her eyes askance as they eat, feeling the intermittent weight of Aurora's gaze, waiting for her to speak of it if she will. They have time for Aurora to gather her thoughts.

The rabbit is hot in Mulan's mouth as the evening grows chill and it is meat after a day's march. They cannot travel like this forever, but for now, they are making good ground. 

It has been eight days since they separated from Snow and Emma. 

Eight days fair journey, as Aurora has become more used to travel on foot, and only one each way lost to travelling back to the Lake Nostos to discover that Snow and Emma, and Cora and Hook, all had vanished. The lake's waters were not the whirling magical portal Mulan had last seen, but the dry sandy basin of noted memory. The compass they had risked so much for could not be found, but Mulan found her father's sword, cast aside in the sand as if it were not equally a treasure of the realm. She is grateful for their ignorance, and grateful to feel the sword's familiar weight by her side.

Emma's sword, too, was in the sand, and that Mulan has travelled with strapped to her back. Aurora knows kitchen blades and dagger lengths, not swords, but Mulan has learnt not to waste good weaponry. If they have the opportunity, she intends to trade it for walking boots for Aurora.

It has been eight days since they last saw another human being. They do not travel for what once was their island safe haven. They have no camp to which to return there. They have no aspirations but the hope that Philip's soul can be removed from the talisman that Aurora carries and reunited with his body. 

They make camp tonight in the hollow of a tree, gnarled roots offering protection on three sides, from who knows what creatures still walk these woods, but little enough from the dropping temperatures of the night. They share Aurora's wrap and Mulan's cape, bundled tightly together against the cold.

"I can't sleep," Aurora admits, after they have been lying there for some time.

"Nightmares?"

"No." Aurora shakes her head, her hair brushing Mulan's cheek. Her height is not much less than Mulan's, but she fits comfortably within her arms.

"This is more recent," she says. 

Mulan's throat closes. 

"Without my heart, I didn't notice what I was missing. I couldn't, because what I was missing were all the things that you need a heart to feel. I'd forgotten what it felt like to love someone."

"I will see Philip restored to you." 

It has been eight days since Mulan opened a leather pouch to hold Aurora's still beating heart in her hand.

"I'm not-- I'm not just talking about Philip," Aurora says, and the weight of her body shifts. Her legs shift, and Mulan feels herself rolling from her side onto her back.

"I feel different now. It's hard to explain. My skin, it's so sensitive. I feel-- so much more now."

For eight days, Mulan has pretended not to notice the way Aurora's nipples have pebbled beneath the thin fabric of her dress. Not to notice her eyes drawn to the movements of Aurora's arms, as she unpinned her shawl each night.

Mulan pulls herself to sitting, grateful for the wood behind her back, for the roots that surround them, for the shock of night air that rips between their bodies as her cloak slips from Aurora's shoulders as she moves astride Mulan's thigh. 

Mulan is grateful for a clear head in the moment she decides to move her fingers over her cloak, when she finds the clasp, and fits it about Aurora's neck. The hand that Aurora does not take to press flat against the valley of her breasts, Mulan has curved about her right hip.

"Haven't you wondered why it was that you were able to replace my heart?"

"I'm no sorcerer," Mulan says. It's a common refrain when people seem to always expect someone with her face to be a little bit magical, but she also thinks that is not what Aurora means. 

"When you gave me back my heart," Aurora begins, and her voice is close enough for Mulan to feel the moist heat of her breath. "You looked at me then like you looked at Philip." 

That is when Mulan kisses her.

Mulan has only ever kissed soldiers. Not Philip, never Philip, who would never do more than look at her after a battle with gratitude in his eyes that they had both lived. Aurora does not kiss like a soldier, but she does not seem disappointed that Mulan knows no other way to kiss, sweet sounds in her throat, her hand clutching Mulan's to her chest.

Aurora's heart flutters like a caged bird beneath her ribs, and it is hard for Mulan not to think of before. Of the way Aurora had gasped when her heart in Mulan's hand had slid home. Of the shape of her open mouth.

Aurora tugs at Mulan's wrist, pushing and pulling at her gloves, even as she strives to keep her lips sealed against Mulan's.

"Aurora," Mulan says. "I don't understand."

"Without your gloves," she says, and, oh, she is already panting between her words.

"Aurora."

"I--I want you to reach inside my chest and touch my heart, the way I think you can."

Perhaps it is easier for both of them, in the dark.

"I can't stop thinking about it," Aurora says. "Or you. Mulan, please."

Mulan strips her gloves.

This time is not like the other. This time, there is not the leather of Mulan's gloves to dull sensation. This time, Aurora has loosened the first few laces of her corset, and so what Mulan's bare hand touches are the curves of soft, warm skin. 

And then in the next moment, her hand is not resting on Aurora's ribs, but beneath them, somehow deep in the hot, soft places of her body. Aurora gasps--

"It hurts--"

"No, please," Aurora moans, her wrist fast about Mulan's wrist, her hand only now knuckle deep. 

Mulan can feel Aurora's pulse in her fingertips, and it is clarity and recognition that she feels her body flooding not with horror but with heat. 

"Please," Aurora says. "Just-- please."

Aurora's heart is so small inside her, small enough to fit so easily into the cupped curve of Mulan's hand. Like a dove, her heart feels so soft, so seemingly fragile, as it beats with her life. And yet there is a firmness there, a solidity at her core, that Mulan can feel as she strokes feather-light and oh so careful, strokes in time with the quickening pace of Aurora's pulse. 

Aurora rides Mulan's thigh with a tight, grinding pressure, and all the concentration of a woman knowing her own body, her own pleasure. Perhaps her eyes are closed; Aurora's vocabulary has narrowed to "yes" and to "please," and that is well with Mulan, as she experiments with the subtle movements of her wrist. 

Mulan has not done this before, not with her hand inside another's chest, another's life cupped in her palm, so small and so precious and so alive, not with pleasures that could surely only be dark without Aurora's begging so sweet in her ears. It must be magic, even if she knows not what, that allows the bones of her wrist and the bones of Aurora's ribs to lie in the same space and only cause Aurora to whimper and moan.

The heart is a muscle, but Mulan does not feel it seize as she does Aurora's thighs, or Aurora's fingers curled tight at Mulan's shoulder. But maybe it, too, skips a beat at Aurora's peak before she is shaking and limp in Mulan's arms, the salt of sweat on her cheek, on her lips for Mulan to taste.

Mulan's hand is not wet once she takes it from Aurora's chest. She thinks of Aurora's hands earlier in the day, but there will be no blood to wash away, to wipe on the grass or on her cloak. Mulan's trouser leg is not wet, either, too many layers to Aurora's skirts.

"I have a handkerchief," Mulan offers.

Aurora thanks her, and her leg presses against Mulan's. It takes Mulan a moment to recognise that this means that Aurora has spread her thighs.

Aurora is wet. She is wet, and soft and hot, smooth wet skin there at the cleft of her legs. She is wet through the smooth silk of Mulan's handkerchief, and against Mulan's fingertips. She is--

"Still sensitive," she gasps.

Mulan knows enough now not to flinch at each twitch of muscle, each sharp intake of breath. She savours them; she saves them as she lets her pulse relax with Aurora's. They will not always be alone in the woods. They will not always only be surviving.

In their tree hollow, Mulan finds the hilt of her sheathed sword by feel, and wraps their make-shift blankets over their bodies anew. It is warmer lying closer, their ankles entwined. 

"Can you sleep now?"

"I think so." 

Mulan always takes the first watch; Aurora rarely sleeps the night through. If she does tonight, Mulan will not wake her.

"I think this is why you could put my heart back," Aurora murmurs, her words broken by a yawn. "Because I'd let you take it. I just didn't know that yet."

Aurora is asleep before Mulan finds words to answer that, but they will have time to speak in the morning. It has taken eight days to travel so far, and these woods are deep. Their journey is not done yet. 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] Touch My Heart](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2391485) by [anna_unfolding](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anna_unfolding/pseuds/anna_unfolding)




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